Obsessing over what your competitors are doing isn’t healthy. At least, not when it’s sucking up time and distracting employees from productive work. If you can automate competitor tracking and relegate the insights to screens that are less likely to be distracting, that’s a different story.

For starters, you need tools that can collect data from a variety of sources and filter out anything useless or unhelpful. You could build a basic version of that yourself or invest in one of the off-the-shelf options for competitor intelligence. But organizing the information well only solves half of the problem. 

Reports about what your rivals are doing will inevitably clog up inboxes or get dumped into a spreadsheet that gets less and less attention over time. You need a hands-off way to collect and present the data so it’s accessible, always up-to-date, and unobtrusive. You need a competitor intelligence dashboard for digital signage.

What is a competitive intelligence dashboard?

A competitive intelligence (CI) dashboard is a tool that aggregates and presents data from several different channels to deliver real-time updates on a competitor’s online presence. It might show you that a business selling similar products or services has recently started focusing on a new industry segment or marketing channel, for instance. Insights that could nudge your team to consider new ways to differentiate or compete head-on.

Because competitive intelligence can come from anywhere, no two dashboards will look the same. But there are some clear favorites. In Competitive Intelligence Alliance’s 2023 Trends Report, 85% of CI experts track press releases and media mentions, 77% monitor competitor websites, and 74% follow competitor social media accounts.

In the same report, Gal Toren from JFrog added that for her team “blog posts are crucial to truly understand how [our competitor’s] product works.” That’s arguably the best jumping-off point since most companies include their most recent articles in email newsletters and social media posts.

Farhan Manjiyani from Grafana’s CI team says “User forums (Reddit, Hacker News, X (FKA Twitter), etc.) will give you a good sense of user reactions to these announcements. What’s real and what’s hype will quickly become clear.” Those are more complicated to find and filter but are an essential counterweight to blog articles’ biased and crafted narratives.

Curating a feed of posts, updates, and announcements from other businesses in your market and grouping them together on a single page provides a reference point for what your team should (and maybe shouldn’t) be doing.

When competitive intelligence comes in handy

Checking in on what competitors are doing shouldn’t be situational or time-bound. Airtable’s Director of Product Marketing, Alex McDonnell, explains that “Rather than thinking of competitive strategy as this separate thing it just has to be infused right into the company strategy. Are you competing as an upstart product against legacy products that have older or more complicated technology? The strategy that you have - whether that’s product strategy or marketing strategy - has to take that context into account.”

Sharing competitive insights and intelligence company-wide keeps everyone on the same page and focused on playing to the same strengths, even when there aren’t any big feature releases, service updates, or other significant events on the horizon. 

Sales reps, for example, close more deals when they know what leads and prospects are reading in forums, product reviews, and competitor collateral. Product development teams create better roadmaps and plans when they’re informed by press releases from rivals and newcomers. Executives are more consistent and on-message during internal and external presentations when they have the latest market intel. But only when information is easily accessible and up to date.

Competitor monitoring tools

It’s hard to define what qualifies as competitive intelligence software. If you want to build your own customized dashboard, Zapier or Power Automate may do most of the heavy lifting, even though neither was designed specifically for competitor tracking. In some cases, you might not need any specialized software at all, opting instead to simply follow a rival’s social media accounts and email newsletter. But for teams with a CI budget, a purpose-built tool can be invaluable. 

1. Klue

This platform distills competitive insights into cards that populate lists, boards, and dashboards. Klue claims that its AI filters out 87% of the updates it finds so users aren’t inundated with repetitive or irrelevant information. Companies can integrate Klue with Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to ensure that discovery and distribution work for everyone.

2. Crayon

While it has a lot of overlap with Klue, Crayon is geared primarily toward large sales teams. For onboarding, the platform includes a large library of CI templates and training courses. After that, day-to-day intelligence is automatically tagged and shared with relevant users. Crayon also tracks which battlecards and competitors your team views and updates most often, so companies can analyze which data types are used most often.

3. Kompyte

Acquired by SEMrush in mid-2022, Kompyte takes advantage of its parent company’s web crawlers to consolidate competitor updates from all over the web. Beyond standard social media tracking, Kompyte grabs job postings (LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor), company reviews (Capterra, G2, TrustRadius), and even updates to app store pages. 

4. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb places a huge emphasis on website and SEO performance. It provides data on traffic, audience demographics, ad placements, and backlinks. It doesn’t offer the same level of report customization and distribution as the other tools on this list, but it’s also the only platform that doesn’t require a sales call to get started.

5. Contify

With its focus on monitoring industry and market trends, Contify is excellent for helping you expand your CI efforts. It uncovers emerging competitors, customer favorites, and review topics. Contify is also one of the most customizable options available. There are a host of features for fine-tuning data sources, filters, tags, and dashboards so everything works just the way you’d like.

You can also gather quite a bit of valuable data with apps that focus on one very specific aspect of competitor monitoring. Data.ai monitors app store rankings and reviews. Ahrefs can suggest and analyze competitor websites. Buzzsumo creates detailed reports on social media likes, shares, and comments. But regardless of whether you go with an all-in-one tool or build a Frankenstein out of separate apps, you need a way to share the data.

Building a competitor tracking dashboard for digital signage

In the early stages of any competitive intelligence program, it’s best to start small. You might only monitor a handful of channels for mentions or updates on a single company. As a former head of competitive intelligence for ZoomInfo and ClickUp, Andrew McCotter-Bicknell recommends that “All intel that you ingest should go through a filtration process. Ask yourself, why does this matter?’ and ‘what should be done?’ From there, you’ll get a refined list of insights and recommendations. Take those and present them in a channel of your stakeholders’ choosing.”

Let’s say that you want to start by tracking three data sources and displaying them on screens mounted around your office: a competitor’s most recent blog articles, social media stats, email newsletter, and mentions from around the web. Here’s how you’d set that up.

Scrape content from a website

Browse.ai’s free plan includes more than enough to watch a blog page for new articles and scrape their titles. Log in, click `+ Build New Robot`, and enter the blog page URL in the textbox. Select Start Recording Task and choose Capture Text once the virtual browser is finished loading. The `From a list` option is best here, letting you hover over a single page element (e.g. blog titles) to scrape all the ones that match it. 

After saving the robot, Browse.ai lets you send the outputs to a few different endpoints, like a Zapier trigger, Google Sheet, or Airtable dashboard. Any one of those would work for showing a competitor’s most recent articles on your office screens.

Monitor public social media profiles

Using software tools to monitor social media can be a tough nut to crack. Most platforms have cracked down on automated scraping, so your best bet is the spreadsheet-on-steroids app Rows. Sign up for a free account, create a spreadsheet, and click Data Actions. Search for the platform you want to monitor and the data you want to pull into the sheet. For example, Rows has functions for “Get public posts of a Facebook page” and “Get the number of followers of Facebook pages.”

Once you’ve set up the functions, you could set up calculations to count the number of posts per month, compare this month’s follower count to last month’s, or anything else synced to your sheet. When you’re done, open the Data Actions menu again and open the Send data tab to connect your spreadsheet to third-party apps. You might sync to an existing Notion dashboard in a digital signage playlist or use the HTTP function to send data directly to a Playgrounds webhook URL.

Automate sentiment analysis for online mentions

Services like Talkwater Alerts scour the web for mentions of any phrase you want to monitor. Usually, though, they only send alerts via email. With Zapier, you can extract relevant data from emails and send them to digital signage-friendly integrations. The Email by Zapier trigger lets you auto-forward alerts to a personalized Zapier address, parse out specific sections, and send the output to an app like Rows in the action phase.

Best of all, Rows’ OpenAI integration includes a sentiment analysis function. So you could have GPT automatically classify online mentions of your competitor as Positive, Neutral, or Negative, and then compare them against your own. Or translate and analyze mentions written in foreign languages. If everyone in your office can see these insights any time they look up from their desk, you might even be able to start jumping into conversations that your competitor isn’t aware of.

Turn competitor data into conversation starters

You have a few options for pulling all of your competitor data together into a digital signage slide. If you’re putting together data in an app like Looker Studio or Geckoboard, grab the dashboard’s embed code and use the Embed app. Another option is to build a Javascript + CSS dashboard and host it in ScreenCloud’s Playgrounds app, adding Chart.js visualizations to update values with a webhook and add brand colors to graphs.

Finally, ScreenCloud’s Pro tier includes the Dashboards feature, which lets you log into your apps, select and scrape any of their graphs, text, or numbers, and add them to digital signage. With the ability to put any number on any screen, you can engage employees with relevant, up-to-date information that doesn’t distract or overwhelm them. 

Digital signage is one of the most effective ways to cascade information for internal communications. Give it a try today with a free 14-day trial of ScreenCloud’s easy-to-use, cloud-based platform!